It’s important to build in a cadence of difference paces in your day, week, project and year. Without it, you risk burning out.
I like to think of this as the four seasons of design (and life). In this video, while walking through my own metaphor, I talk about what that looks like and how you might apply it to your work and life.
Transcript
Intro
[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hi, so I thought I would do a slightly different Coaching Reflections this morning and take you on my morning walk with Charlie, who’s there, um, because I’m walking around here orchards and and fields and it reminded me of something I’ve talked about before which is this idea of the four seasons of design but I think it’s true of of life and work in general.
The Four Seasons of Design
[00:00:26] Andy Polaine: There was a book by John Seymour called The Guide to Self Sufficiency that my parents had when I was growing up and it had all these different pictures of the garden at different times of the year and it’s a something that really stuck with me as an idea. You know in springtime you prepare the ground, you sow seeds and plants and then it comes to summer and they grow, they grow like crazy if you have a good summer and sometimes get a bit out of control.
Uh, you don’t do much cutting back, you’re just sort of letting it go. And that’s kind of what our default state is with work, which is just growth all the time as fast as possible. A bit like bamboo growing everywhere. Uh, but come to autumn, and these trees for example have been all trimmed back a couple of months ago ready for winter. They’ll probably have another trim in early spring ready for the growth in spring. They’ve all dropped their leaves and that means they draw their energies down into their roots ready for winter. And I think it’s a really important time. In the garden in autumn you tend to everything, you cut stuff back, you repair fences, you check everything’s okay and maybe make some changes.
And then in winter you, you stop, like you’re forced to stop. And, rather than seeing that as a, the brakes, putting the brakes on, and in the northern hemisphere this idea of, um, kind of three months of purgatory and dark night, that in fact it can be quite nice. It can be a quite nice introspective time where you recharge and think about what you want to do, what you want to do with your life, what you want to do with work.
And on a kind of daily, or weekly, or project, or certainly yearly basis, you can think of that cadence too. Where what you’re doing is making sure that you take time to go for a walk, take time to go and have a coffee without checking Slack. Certainly if you’re in a leadership role, nobody’s going to do that for you.
You really have to defend that time, those time and boundaries. And for your team, you can enable that, you can enable a culture that that’s okay. That staring out the window is an okay thing to do. Because reflection time and time to think and the lack of it is something that coaches often complain about to me and it’s one of the things we spend time on early on.
And so, you know, whether it’s in a, in a week where you say, okay, on Fridays, we’re going to have a slightly slower pace. or, uh, in the month or the year, try and think about that cadence so that you’re not just flat out growing all the time. Because the goal of life is not productivity. I hate to break it to you productivity fiends out there.
The goal of life is sustainable growth. And if you don’t, if these trees don’t drop their leaves and recharge over winter, And they will eventually die. They’ll weaken and die because they don’t have that recharge time. And that’s of course what burnout is when it comes to our relationship to work.
Outro
[00:03:35] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s a useful thought for you.
Go out, take some time to recharge, enjoy the winter. Here where my metaphor completely breaks down in the southern hemispheres where you’re about to have your summer holidays after Christmas and New Year, well enjoy that. It’s a different kind of recharge. Should give you a hint that you should do this more often than just winter.
And um, I will put a link to the presentation that I did ages ago about this in the notes. And if you’re interested in my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. Thanks. I’ll see you again soon.
